invertebabe

Latest Posts by invertebabe

The Giant Pacific Octopus beanie is back!

Collab with the incredible @invertebabe, go to their shop here

Shares deeply appreciated, it's rough times y'all.

Oh man this is popping off now

Unfortunately the cards are sold out but the memes are here to stay <3

Idk about y’all but valentines memes have been my favorite part of the holiday since I was an inappropriately young child on the internet

So I made some cephalopod themed ones for your enjoyment <3

These puns are ones that did not make the cut for our actual Valentine’s Day cards shown in the last image

Purchase them at squidfacts.bigcartel.com <3

Sarah I want you to know that I work at a zoo so I got 40 squid Valentines for my entire department. These are going to be a hit I know it

Omg I love this so much.

Everybody else, there's still about a week left to get these before Valentines Day. Get 'em at Squidfacts.bigcartel.com

Idk about y’all but valentines memes have been my favorite part of the holiday since I was an inappropriately young child on the internet

So I made some cephalopod themed ones for your enjoyment <3

These puns are ones that did not make the cut for our actual Valentine’s Day cards shown in the last image

Purchase them at squidfacts.bigcartel.com <3

Do you like Squid Facts? 🔲Yes 🔲No

This valentines day, we thought you might need a little help from cephalopods to celebrate. Get a pack of 20 cards for your classroom, your coworkers, your neighborhood, frankly anyone who needs both a valentine AND a little bit of science to boot.

Get 'em here: https://squidfacts.bigcartel.com/

Proceeds benefit science education nonprofit Skype a Scientist AND the graduate student who designed these cards who is studying octopuses (Meg Mindlin @invertebabe!). Meg is trying to afford to get to a cephalopod neuroscience conference later this year and these cards will help her get there 🫡

They, of course, come with the classic heart stickers, a range of shades of pink and purple included.

Im that graduate student and designed these! Buy them because they’re adorable and support scientists

A win win if you ask me

Do you like Squid Facts? 🔲Yes 🔲No

This valentines day, we thought you might need a little help from cephalopods to celebrate. Get a pack of 20 cards for your classroom, your coworkers, your neighborhood, frankly anyone who needs both a valentine AND a little bit of science to boot.

Get 'em here: https://squidfacts.bigcartel.com/

Proceeds benefit science education nonprofit Skype a Scientist AND a graduate student studying octopuses (Meg Mindlin!), trying to afford to get to a cephalopod neuroscience conference later this year.

They, of course, come with the classic heart stickers, a range of shades of pink and purple included.

Wasp-mimic clearwing moth, Euhagena emphytiformis, Sesiidae

Found in the United States

Photo 1 by ellen5

Let’s get carcinized.

With the crab facts advent calendar, you can scratch off the iridescence to reveal one crab fact every day! We dug deep into the facts vault to bring you some deep cuts. We know you'll love 'em.

Get a calendar here 👇🏻

Art by @franzanth

These calendars support Skype a scientist! We're a small science education nonprofit. We connect scientists with classrooms, scout troops, libraries and more! We offer our programming totally for free. We also run the squid facts hotline! Calendars support our work 🧬

She's in her natural habitat

Limacia cockerelli

photography by meg mindlin

its official. pelagic thresher sharks are the most absurd little miserable creechures i have ever seen

i love it

Living Fossils - Creatures that remain seemingly unchanged by time. Here's the Coelacanth, the Sturgeon, the Gar, the Horseshoe Crab and the Nautilus! (Gouache on 50x40cm canvas, available for purchase)

nudibranchs via seaslugs_n_stargazers on ig

If you asked me as a kid what my favorite animal was, there's a good chance I'd respond "chambered nautilus", though I probably would mispronounce it. I don't know if it's still my favorite but it's definitely up there in the pantheon of weird critters. For this Wet Beast Wednesday, I'll discuss my childhood favorite.

(image: a nautilus)

The nautilus is a cephalopod that lives in a curved shell and looks similar to (but is not closely related to) the extinct ammonites. There are 6 living species in two genera, but 90% of the time when someone is discussing nautiluses they are referring to the most well-known species: Nautilus pompilius or the chambered nautilus. Nautiloids are ancient, going back to at least the late triassic with their more primitive ancestors going back as far as the ordovician period, a time when only invertebrates and primitive plants occupied the land and true fish had not yet appeared. Because of their ancient history, nautiluses are sometimes considered living fossils. I have ranted before on how misleading the term "living fossil" is so I'll spare you that for now. Nautiloids are considered a sister group to the celoids, which contains all the squid, octopus, cuttlefish, and everything else we thinks of as cephalopods. Nautiluses should not be confused with paper nautiluses. Also called argonauts, paper nautiluses are a group of octopi that make an egg case which looks like a shell.

(image: a nautilus)

The most noticeable feature of a nautilus is its shell. The shell is smooth and finely curving, naturally growing in the shape of a logarithmic spiral (though not, as is commonly stated, a golden ratio spiral). The shell has a stripy outer layer and an inner layer coated with nacre. Internally, the shell is divided into camarae (chambers) separated from each other by walls called septa. Each septum has a small hole in it through which a strand of tissue called the siphuncle passes. Most of the nautilus's body is in the foremost and largest chamber. The shell grows new septa as the animal grows, with the nautilus's body moving to a new chamber as it becomes too large for previous ones. Juveniles are typically born with 4 septa, with adults having as many as 30. In addition to providing protection from predators, the shell is also key for regulating buoyancy. The septa can contain pressurized gas or water and the siphuncle regulates their contents by either adding or removing water to increase or decrease buoyancy. Because of its pressurized contents, the shell can only withstand pressure at depths up to 800 M (2,400 ft) before imploding. Oddly enough, nautiluses can be safely brought up from deep waters where most animals would be killed by the pressure changes. To move, the nautilus pulls water into the first chamber of the shell using its hyponome (siphon) and shoots it back out. The chambered nautilus is the largest species, with a maximum shell diameter of 25 cm (10 in), though most get no larger than 20 cm (8 in).

(image: a diagram of nautilus anatomy. source)

Where celoid cephalopods have tentacles, nautiluses instead have numerous cirri. Unlike tentacles, cirri are less muscular, are not elastic, and have no suckers. They are used to grab objects using their ridged surfaces and can hold in so hard that trying to take an object away from a nautilus can rip off its cirri, which will remain firmly attached. In addition, the nautilus has modified cirri that serve as olfactory receptors and a pair that serve to open and close the shell when the nautilus needs to retract into it or emerge. Nestled within the cirri is the beak, which is used to consume the nautilus's primary prey of invertebrates, though they have also been seen scavenging fish. Their eyes are less developed than most cephalopods, lacking a lens and consisting of a small pinhole that only allows the nautilus to see simple imagery. Their brains are differently structured than most cephalopods and studies have found them to have considerably shorter long-term memories.

(image: a chambered nautilus (upper left) next to a rare Allonautilus scrobiculatus. source)

Cephalopod reproduction is quite different than that of other cephalopods. While most cephalopods are short-lived and semelparous (reproducing only once), nautiluses can live over 20 years and reproduce multiple times (iteroparity). They do not reach sexual maturity until around 15 years old, with females laying eggs once per year. Eggs are attached to rocks and take 8 to 12 months to hatch. Males have a structure called the spadix composed of 4 fused cirri that they use to transfer sperm to females. Females lose their gonads after laying their eggs and will regenerate them for the next year's mating season. Interestingly, male nautiluses seem to vastly outnumber the females.

(image: nautiluses mating)

Nautiluses are found in the Indo-Pacific reagion of the ocean and can be found on the steep slopes of coral reefs. They prefer to inhabit waters several hundred meters down. It was once believed that they would rise to shallow waters at night to feed, lay eggs, and mate, but their vertical migration behavior has since been shown to be more complex than that. They have noon been fished by humans for their shells, which have become popular subjects in art and can be made into a number of decorative pieces. The nacre of the shell can be polished into osmeña pearl, which can be quite valuable. Demand for the shells combined with the late sexual maturity and low fecundity is threatening all the species. As of 2016, nautiluses have been added to the CITES Appendix II, making them protected by limiting international trade of their shells. Despite this, they are still threatened and require further protection

(image: a carved and painted nautilus shell from the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, Milan)

Daily Cephalopod #28

The Sea Creature of the Day is the Gulper Eel/Pelican Eel!

i keep forgetting to do this until im half asleep each night so this one is going to be a shorter one

i love deep sea creatures that just have the adaptation of more mouth 🥰 among those, the gulper eel is by far the most simultaneously horrifying and adorable and i love them a lot

every time they eat something i like to imagine them making a lil "nom" noise

sea creature of the day is the wolf eel i love these silly fellas!!! they are very beautiful to me

okay this a great post but they deserve more credit for their dumb lil brains!!!

They have short and long term memory, the ability to learn and solve complex problems! They even can switch tactics during said problem and work it out another way! Given multiple cognitive tasks they before pretty damn well!!!

They barely have a brain and can do all that!!! They deserve more credit for their hard work !!!!

Nautiluses. THIS goddamn animal.

The fundamentals of this design are HALF A BILLION YEARS OLD. Look at its weird eyes. It evolved back when eyes were still new. Those are literal pinhole cameras. Because nature invented photography the same way we did, apparently.

It doesn't have tentacles. Those are cirri, which lots of sea animals use to do all sorts of things. Fetal nautiluses have one giant slug foot that splits into these. They have noodle antennae made out of foot.

You can bring them up out of the ocean and they can survive the equivalent change of like 80 standard atmospheres. That shouldn't be possible. These things evolved a goddamn spacesuit...500 million years ago.

They also swim via jet propulsion. Their shells make them buoyant, which they can regulate, and they shoot water from a pump. So their 500 million year old spacesuit also has a goddamn rocket pack.

There have been 5 mass extinction events (we are causing a six one now). This thing has survived all of them. And it never got better eyes.

Or A BRAIN. That's right. This thing predates BRAINS. It has two separated lobes behind its top and bottom halves of beak that apparently work well enough that it can track smells with okay accuracy in total darkness, in 3 dimensions.

Here is one eating a dead fish.

Goddamn.

An essay on why glass squid are the best squids

Look at them

They stare into your soul, their tentacles are small and pathetic, they look like party balloons.

2. They live near the surface from birth and progressively swim into deeper waters when reaching adulthood, near the surface their transparency and glow elements likely serve as camouflage.

3. I threatened they can suck their little head and arms into they mantle cavity (depressingly I couldn’t find any photos of that so here’s an artistic rendering)

4. They support the LGBTQ-Community

How could they not. They are just good squids.

Sneaking out of the office early on a Friday like…

Deep-sea giant isopods use their 14 legs to tiptoe along the seafloor. When the need to move a little more quickly arises, they fan out their uropod and pleopods (their tail and swimming limbs) and paddle away. Either way, they’re getting a jumpstart on the weekend. 

Drew some poisonous & venomous sea creatures for my first foray into risograph printing. I’m so pleased with how bright the colors turned out in-person. :') [shop link]

Lookf at these buges…

I think everyone needs to see them

Climbing a mountain just to read a book >>>

Phyllodesmium poindimiei

Skeleton of Mola Mola as Mola rotunda - the Ocean sunfish

Spolia Atlantica. Bidrag til Kundskab om Klump- eller Maanefiskene (Molidae). Japetus Steenstrup and Chr Lutken Published 1898

A scorpion and a crawfish.

Thought about making this a longer comic but for now it’s just me fooling around with ink + digital painting

(lyrics are from Half Life by the Symposium)

Deception Pass State Park, Washington